What happened during ELAYS?

6 Latin American social entrepreneurs

+ 10 experts and facilitators

+ 50 motivated young people

+ tons of inspiration and practical support

= new innovative high impact social projects to tackle global challenges locally in Switzerland

= development aid turned upside down =

8 new youth-led projects =

IntegrAction aims at putting into place an “adoption” program, where Swiss families serve as a “godfather/mother” that help newly arrived immigrants integrating into Swiss society. The goal is to establish a win-win-situation where Swiss broaden their horizons and benefit from intercultural learning, while the immigrants obtain a personal contact that can provide them practical advice on life in Switzerland, starting by where to do your groceries to explaining how the school systems work or sending their kids to the same soccer club. For starters, the team decided to find a newly arrived immigrant family for themselves, to test their idea.

Responsible career day: Career Days at Swiss universities in general present only traditional big players as potential employers to their students. The idea of „Responsible career day“ is to create a complementary event with responsible companies as alternative employers for young people willing to start their career. The desired impact is double: First, to encourage companies to become more socially & environmentally responsible and second, to funnel students to socially and environmentally responsible companies. The pilot project is planned to take place in 2011 at the university of Zurich.

Box & eat wants to answer to the generalized problem of waste in the (fast) food industry and to its impact on the environment. For that reason Box&eat proposes to put into place a new system of reusable lunch boxes that could be used in (all) take away restaurants. The savings in package for the restaurants could be turned into discounts for people bringing their reusable lunchboxes to pick up their food, which creates a virtuous circle of more and more people using reusable lunchboxes and restaurants offering the service to gain more clients. At the moment the team is testing its idea by bringing their tupper ware boxes to fast food restaurants and asking to have their food served in them.

Four Senses : Blind people in Latin America remain largely marginalized from society and do not get access to jobs. The project team wants to start a blind restaurant without light (inspired by the idea of blind cow in Zurich) where blind people serve the food. The aim of the project is to give a job to disabled people, help them integrate into society and raise awareness about the situation of blind people. The team is networking with São Paolo’s blind associations and one of its members will move to São Paolo by the end of the year to set the ground for the project.

Dessine-moi un pont: Based on personal experience, the project team identified the integration of immigrant children into Swiss society as a big challenge. They seek to promote the exchange between Swiss and immigrant children through the common drawing of images for a calendar that shows everyone that children are but children. The calendar can be sold to their parents and the public in general and the plan Is to organize a “vernissage” where the parents to get in direct contact. At the moment the team is trying to find the two first classes from two different schools (because often schools in certain districts have a high percentage of immigrant children while others have almost none) to launch their pilot project.

CareAct wants to answer to the lack of awareness and action on environmental issues among youth in Switzerland. For that reason Careact intends to organize environmental summer camps to increase the connection to the environment, to promote understanding of environmental issues and to start taking concrete actions in order to tackle environmental problems on a local level. For now, the team is working on the program of their first environmental summer camp.

Rethinking global poverty will be an event that responds to the need of rethinking the way in which we conceive poverty. It shall be a one day event that will take place in 4 cities all over the world, where the project members come from originally, in northern and southern countries. RGP will enable people to understand, redefine and take action against poverty thanks to activities aimed at raising awareness, networking, exchanging, facilitating day by day actions and finding possible solutions together. The project team is now looking for established institutions that work on poverty and organize events on the issue to work out partnerships.

Reality Shock : People do not have an environmentally responsible lifestyle due to a lack of knowledge, information and foremost: personal experience. To solve these problems the team wants to organize an online reality show with an important educational/ fun factor. The plan is to have four young people participating in the reality show to experience the impact their lifestyle can have on them if the consequences of their actions can be directly felt. The goal is to raise awareness on sustainable lifestyle in the public and teach people how to change their lifestyle to live more sustainably. The team is at the moment looking for partners from the media sector to evaluate the feasibility of the project.